December 27, 2009

Data Recovery with TestDisk

After several days of frantic picture-taking my mom yesterday managed to delete all the pictures from her digicam (instead of copying them to the computer’s hard drive). Desperation ensued. Luckily 2 minutes of googling for “file undelete on linux” turned up the name of the TestDisk utility. On Ubuntu it can easily be installed via apt.

This little gem offers a variety of functions including file undelete and can work with a great number of file-systems:

TestDisk can

Fix partition table, recover deleted partition

Recover FAT32 boot sector from its backup

Rebuild FAT12/FAT16/FAT32 boot sector

Fix FAT tables

Rebuild NTFS boot sector

Recover NTFS boot sector from its backup

Fix MFT using MFT mirror

Locate ext2/ext3 Backup SuperBlock

Undelete files from FAT, NTFS and ext2 filesystem

Copy files from deleted FAT, NTFS and ext2/ext3 partitions.

TestDisk worked flawlessly, was easy to use and made restoring all the deleted pictures (even ones deleted over half a year ago) a breeze. A big thanks to the developers and happy holidays 🙂

PS: I just browsed around the TestDisk site and found a second tool called PhotoRec . This is a specialized tool for recovering video and photo files. In contrast to TestDisk this utility ignores the file system and goes after the underlying data, so it will still work even if your media’s file system has been severely damaged or reformatted. Luckily I did not need it to recover my photos but if using TestDisk fails, this tool might be worth a try.